Community

#7 Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

2010 has been all about building community for me.
I didn’t really get involved with Twitter until this spring. Slowly I’ve been building a community of people I care about. I love reading the food and wine blogs. I’m getting involved with the education bloggers and many of the people I follow are people I’ve been lucky enough to meet “In Real Life”. The community that I’ve been building around the Ignite Boulder crowd is so kick-ass and I’ve only been an Ignite junkie since #9 which was held at the Boulder Library. And was so small and relatively quiet in comparison to every other I’ve been to since. (I haven’t missed one yet… and I don’t plan to!) I’m so excited to be building relationships with the real people who front these awesome, geeky presentations. They totally inspire me to man-up (someday) and submit a spark of my own. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to create much of this community without Twitter… so thanks guys for indulging my random overshares and gushings about food, wine and teaching!

Also, as mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been building community in my Kindergarten classroom. I have 25 very sweet, very smart and very chatty Kindergarteners. Not to mention 3 different paraprofessionals and about 6 or so classroom volunteers and a principal who are all in and out on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. (It gets a bit sort of totally chaotic at times.) But we’re doing it. We’re building our community. Based on routines, shared goals, common strengths and challenges we are transforming a classroom of individuals into a cohesive family.
It hasn’t been an easy year. In Kindergarten alone there have been four re-assignments (basically this means that the child is moved to a different classroom after the year is underway and it happens for various reasons) three of which have affected our classroom community. One of our boys moved next door. One the boys from next door joined us (it sounds like a swap, it wasn’t really, but it was hard nevertheless). Finally, we added another little boy from a different full-day class. This was all after the second month of school. In the first week alone we lost two little girls to the other full-day program at their “home” school. We’ve had a lot of change this year and change is hard on a community. Especially change that the children have no control over… so I work hard to give them space for ownership in changes that I want to make… changes that I hope will lead to more and better learning situations. But you know, these kids get *it*. They know what they need in order to learn and they’re pretty good about letting us adults know (as long as we’re paying attention). Then as a teacher it becomes my job to balance what they need and what they’re *supposed* to know. And therein lies the greatest challenge in my classroom community. I want it to be a democracy and I have full faith that the children in our room make good decisions about how and what they learn… however my job depends on presenting administrators with physical data of what these children have learned in my care.
(Warning- Soapbox tangent… this is where we’ve really gone wrong with education –especially in early childhood- we’ve forgotten that child aren’t a “product” and parents and administrators aren’t the “client”!)
So how do I balance that sense of community and still get them to learn everything they’re supposed to? Some days I have absolutely no idea.
Other days it just falls together.
We’re kinda like a family like that.
We have our good days, our great days and days where I just want to cry because I feel like I might be failing them.
But we keep going.
Together.
Because that is what a community does.